We no longer want to be a melting pot, because we don't understand what is already melted.

When I first came to New York everybody on the scene would treat me like I could play but I couldn't.

There's so much spirit of integration and democracy in jazz.

I get so much from having the opportunity to interface with the younger people and to bring information to them and to represent our culture and our way of life. The feeling and the warmth and the love, it's unbelievable. The type of exchange that goes on between students and teachers or visiting people who are doing master classes, and not just when they're musicians. Even general classes, when the students are not necessarily musicians.

I wanted to make somebody feel like Coltrane made me feel, listening to it.

When I came to New York, to Brooklyn, I met Alvin Ailey and Stanley Crouch and August Wilson. They were always putting things in a philosophical context. All the great jazz musicians did, too. There was always a sub-context to what they were saying about music even though they would be very down home and earthy. So I started to develop, in addition to my power and ability to simply hear, a way to place myself in a time.

I think that when the education system started to be dismantled during the first Great Depression in the 1930s, we didn't recover from that.